Sanjay Aggarwal, founder of the Spice Kitchen, explains why the business should win the home business category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition.
Following my mother’s retirement several years ago, I started a small company that would play to her strengths. She is of Indian descent but was born and raised in Kenya, so has an eclectic mix of cultures. She is an incredible cook and an oracle on spices, and so Spice Kitchen was born.
We turned our house into a spice laboratory, converting a room into an enormous spice larder. In addition to our 100-year-old hand grinder and African pestle and mortar, we bought the necessary equipment that we needed to process, blend and roast spices.
Since then we have developed a range of international spice blends from places like India, Jamaica, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Bengal and north Africa.
We designed and developed all our marketing ourselves, creating a logo that contained elephants – an animal that links India and Africa, and is dear to our hearts.
We have partnered with e-commerce shops that sell our products and are continuing to spread into new products such as mulled wine and masala chai teabags.
We are now fulfilling contracts with a number of restaurants and chefs, creating bespoke spice blends for them which they use in their dishes. We are also working with a number of cookbook authors, creating bespoke products and spice sets for them that are an ideal pairing for purchasers of their cookbooks.
All in all, everything comes back to my parents’ house, where the innovation, creativity, hard work and fun happens as we continue to please customers and improve what we do every day.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
